Thursday, May 12, 2016

Lea Graham, This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch

On Crows

Last Thursday, the light at the ridge above
that bend in the Hudson spread like Dreamsicles in July. Crows valentined
dumpsters. Earth called cadence below. Lamps floated stem-less, sturgeon moons
in a month of wolf whistles & Route 9’s chemical taste. Was it Williams who
said “the hardest thing to do is see”? (Or was that just my gynecologist?) As a
kid, my mother caged a crow believing one day it would sing “Hello, Dolly.” She
faithfully fed it pork chops under a sycamore tree. Instead, it ate her
spelling bee ring. She often said: Crows
love the shiny things. Beware.

I
think that being from Arkansas, I have both a good sense of humour about place,
but also a sense of the underdog in me. I think that maybe that’s a sense of
the west, what you are up against, a sense of the isolated or rural. I grew up
partially on my grandparents working farm in Greenland, Arkansas where I had an
acute feeling of how isolated I was from the rest of the world (meaning: the
world of books). But also, I had these young uncles and an aunt who worked in
my grandfather’s dairy barn and chicken houses—and who were always playing
jokes on me and my brothers and on each other. They used to leave messages to
each other written in soap on the bathroom mirrors. There was a toolbox of arrowheads,
fish hooks, grinding stones and Civil War cannon balls under the sink in the
bathroom. I have written of that image over and over again. The sense of the
humorous and fleeting, but of the tactile and enduring, too. When I read cooley
and Kroetsch, it felt like I was reading at least a part of my own family, but
in the most intellectual and tricky ways. And to be geographically connective
about it, my maternal grandmother was from the Dakotas and later Montana. Her
mother was from Norway and had been a homesteader.She—Dagmar Zacharias—is the only one of my
great-grandparents who was from the old country—everyone else was “American.”
In any case, my maternal grandmother met my grandfather when he was an
itinerant worker from Northwest Arkansas during the Depression and had worked
his way up to Billings, Montana where he worked part of the week in a bakery
and another part in a dairy. The bakery was in a basement, but had a window
onto the street where you could only see people’s legs. He picked out her legs
of all the young nurses on their way to school. This family story (or maybe the
way I tell it), doesn’t seem far from the Canadian narratives I’ve read.

Robert
Kroetsch infamously called literature a conversation, and the epistolary poems
in Graham’s This End of the World: Notes
to Robert Kroetsch do read as missives directed to the late Alberta poet,
composed directly from where she is to wherever it is that he is, or was, and
her ten poem collection opens with a quote from Kroetsch’s Excerpts from the Real World: “Perhaps if I call you forever you’ll
hear me toward the end.” Kroetsch famously wrote poems that spoke of repeatedly
returning to the beginning; through composing “the end,” is Graham attempting
to circumvent Kroetsch’s continuous delay, or is she simply responding in kind,
composing the yang to his ying? Is she, through her title, admitting that she
can actually hear him, and could the entire time? In the poem “After Irene,” written
after a hurricane, she writes: “You’ve written that our job is to uninvent the world. To unconceal. To make visible
again.” Later on in the same piece, ending:

You’ve said it yourself: we can never leave home, never escape the skiffle bands &
buttermilk, the avocado seed suspended on windowsills. You with your buffalo
wallow & tipi ring. So long Binghamtop dreams! Me with my Civil War
cannonballs, knucklebones under the sink. Our storm’s core cages us like a
story. Like a thousand sea birds, bewildered, becalmed, trapped in eye’s past.

Her
poems are prose-thick with information and references, collaged narratives
composed in furious, passionate bursts, each in their own way searching for
ways in which to make sense of the chaos, all of which is directed beyond the
immediate chaos and back into “Bob” (all of which makes me hope she comes to
Ottawa next spring for the rumoured Robert Kroetsch conference, so she can
speak to him further). “You sing on the other side of the Wailing Wall,” she
writes, to end her poem “Excerpts from This End of the World”: “words I wish I
could take back / from the Coro desert or the post-industrial town / I am
doomed to & that promise / of milk, honey.” Her poems evoke much of
Kroetsch’s work for their shared questioning, their passions, from friends, food,
travel and lovers, and the occasional drunken revelry and crude passing remark.
Throughout these poems there is a searching, a seeking, as she looks to the
work of Robert Kroetsch for advice, and direction, almost as though the lyrics
of Lea Graham are repeatedly asking Robert Kroetsch: Why does the heart want
what it wants? As she opens the poem “On the Mystery of the Vanishing
Phoenician from 110 Mill Street”: “Bob, / I am writing this from the old
millstream where your Sad Phoenician
vanishes. I bring it with me to sit on the ledge when I need the rush, an
eyeful of swoosh. Just when I’m fixed on a bright flip-flop or stroller wheel,
I realize it’s skedaddled.” Later on in the same piece, writing:

Last month it disappeared to a dance in Smuts.
All the way to Wood Mountain, can you believe it? That bit from cooley, who
said it had been seen with Suknaski’s ghosts. They snuck into an old Métis
church with their beer breath & dialect, telling stories of Duck Lake, sex
in mangers. It drug in a few days later, stone-roasted, announcing its
retirement to Assiniboia. Boy oh boy, Bob, did you raise it to act like this?
Even crazy mclennan swears it Skypes him late every fourth Tuesday, repeating pornographers & poets enjoy large views
nine times before clicking end. He & his lady shake & drink & claim
they’ll start banning its mention from the Mercury Lounge. It late-nights,
inventing toponomies for Medicine Hat. Can’t shut up about the onomastics of
ex-lovers (the woman from Nanaimo, et al). How do I exist with a book that goes
on like this?